Cancer Clinics Still Suffering From Sequester, Ask Why FAA was Fixed, Cancer Ignored

Photo Credit: José GoulãoCongress should have addressed deep cuts to cancer clinics before tackling airline delays caused by sequestration, people at several of those clinics said Friday.

Both the House and Senate have now voted to restore funding that the Federal Aviation Administration lost through the automatic budget cuts known as “sequestration.” The bill is headed to President Obama’s desk.

Although delays in air travel affect lawmakers personally, cancer clinics say the cuts they are facing under the sequester are far more serious — and should have been a higher priority for Congress.

“I would invite anyone in Washington to come look my patients in the eye and tell them that waiting for a flight is a bigger problem than traveling farther and waiting longer for chemotherapy,” said William Nibley, a doctor at Utah Cancer Specialists in Salt Lake City.

Cancer clinics have seen their Medicare payments slashed under sequestration. They have had to turn away thousands of new patients, and some clinics say they will have to close their doors for good if the sequester cuts are not reversed soon.

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Feds Now Seek Punitive Fines Against Tech Companies Who Won't Eavesdrop on Internet Users

Photo Credit: Truthout.orgA government task force is preparing legislation that would pressure companies such as Face­book and Google to enable law enforcement officials to intercept online communications as they occur, according to current and former U.S. officials familiar with the effort.

Driven by FBI concerns that it is unable to tap the Internet communications of terrorists and other criminals, the task force’s proposal would penalize companies that failed to heed wiretap orders — court authorizations for the government to intercept suspects’ communications.

Rather than antagonizing companies whose cooperation they need, federal officials typically back off when a company is resistant, industry and former officials said. But law enforcement officials say the cloak drawn on suspects’ online activities — what the FBI calls the “going dark” problem — means that critical evidence can be missed.

“The importance to us is pretty clear,” Andrew Weissmann, the FBI’s general counsel, said last month at an American Bar Association discussion on legal challenges posed by new technologies. “We don’t have the ability to go to court and say, ‘We need a court order to effectuate the intercept.’ Other countries have that. Most people assume that’s what you’re getting when you go to a court.”

There is currently no way to wiretap some of these communications methods easily, and companies effectively have been able to avoid complying with court orders.

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Driver Charged in Killing of Orthodox Jewish Couple Says 'Accidents Happen'

Photo Credit: APThe hit-and-run ex-con charged with mowing down a young Orthodox Jewish couple in New York last month, killing them and their unborn child, said “accidents happen,” in his first remarks about that death-filled day.

Julio Acevedo, 44, told WABC in a jailhouse interview he was deeply sorry, but insisted he was not speeding down a Brooklyn street, as alleged — and that the cabbie ferrying Nachman Glauber and his pregnant wife Raizy Glauber on March 3 ran a stop sign and thus deserves an equal measure of fault in the tragedy.

“I can’t bring ’em back; it was an accident,” Julio Acevedo reportedly said, “I apologize deeply.”

“I’m made out to be the monster in all this . . . Sure I played a part. I couldn’t stop. Accidents happen. I’m sad. It was a tragedy. Let’s ask the cab driver why did he run the stop sign.”

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Palin Slams the 'DC Assclowns' at the 'Pathetic' White House Correspondents' Dinner

During the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, Obama made a number of self-deprecating jokes. He mentioned that he was “not the strapping young Muslim Socialist that [he] used to be,” and suggested that casino magnate Sheldon Adelson could have assured Romney of victory if he had simply offered to buy Obama out of the presidency for “$100 million,” rather than spending money on political ads.

Obama also joked that he was taking his “charm offensive on the road; a Texas barbeque with Ted Cruz, a Kentucky bluegrass concert with Rand Paul, and a book-burning with Michele Bachmann.”

Palin slammed the whole affair, tweeting, “That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom.”


In a Facebook post she said, “Yuk it up media and pols. While America is buried in taxes and a fight for our rights, the permanent political class in DC dresses up and has a prom to make fun of themselves. No need for that, we get the real joke.”

The National Journal’s Ron Fournier observed:

Washington never looks more out of touch than it will this weekend, when movie stars, music moguls, media mavens and their advertisers join President Obama at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner.

Report: Hillary Clinton Lied Twice Under Oath

Photo Credit: IIP StateA new congressional report indicates former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may have lied under oath at least twice during her Benghazi testimony. On September 11, 2012 four Americans including U.S. Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens were killed in a terrorist attack by militants linked to al-Qaida and Ansar al-Sharia. Militants stormed the U.S. consulate building in Benghazi, Libya with rockets and machine guns; Stevens and four other Americans died.

Stevens became the first U.S. Ambassador since 1988 to die in office. And CIA employees and former Navy SEALs Tyrone Woods and Glen Doherty were both killed despite the fact that the U.S. military had almost seven hours to send them back-up assistance.

Hillary Hyperbole #1: She Didn’t See or Approve Cables Requesting Support In Libya

Obama’s White House and Clinton’s State Department knew of the danger to Stevens for months and did nothing about it. On August 16, Stevens sent a cable notifying Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the State Department of an anticipated “coordinated attack” that the consulate would not be able to manage without backup support. Clinton’s State Department did not take proactive measures to respond.

On the day of the attack, reports indicate that the CIA initially denied requests from its own personnel for backup assistance at the U.S. consulate in Benghazi and later at the CIA annex or safe house. When support finally arrived, it was too late.
This January, Clinton testified that: “I have made it very clear that the security cables did not come to my attention…” and “I didn’t see those requests. They didn’t come to me. I didn’t approve them. I didn’t deny them.”

But a new congressional report shows that Clinton did indeed sign an April, 2012 State Department cable acknowledging formal requests for help. So, she DID know of various cables requesting assistance in Libya. Reporter @SharylAtkisson tweeted that while Clinton knew of these requests for aid, she “ordered the withdrawal of elements to proceed as planned.” Worse yet, the report indicates that Obama’s White House and State Department literally changed their talking points in order to cover for Clinton. Specifically: “…. to remove references to likely participation of Islamic extremists in attacks, references to threat of extremists linked to al Qaeda…,” according to the report.

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Bill Maher Slams Boston Police

Photo Credit: APBill Maher called Boston police officers “unprofessional” on Friday for shooting at the boat where Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding even though it turned out he was unarmed.

“I agree that we shouldn’t have given the kid his Miranda rights because he probably had information. We wanted to take him alive. We all agree with that.… there could’ve been bombs out there, there could’ve been an accomplice. So we wanted to take him alive. If you agree with that then what the cops did there was unprofessional. That’s called contagious fire,” Maher said on HBO’s “Real Time.”

According to reports, no gun was found inside the boat after Tsarnaev was captured, although the Boston Police commissioner had earlier said that cops had exchanged fire with the suspect.

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Boston Terror Suspects' Uncle was Married to CIA Officer's Daughter and Even Shared a Home with the Agent

Photo Credit: APAn uncle of the Boston bombers was previously married to a CIA officer’s daughter for three years, it emerged today.

Ruslan Tsarni, who publicly denounced his two terrorist nephews’ actions and called them ‘Losers’, even lived with his father-in-law agent Graham Fuller in his Maryland home for a year.

Mr Fuller was forced to explain the relationship today as news of the family link emerged online.

He told Al-Monitor that his daughter, Samantha, was married to Ruslan, whose surname was then Tsarnaev, for three to four years in the 1990s. The couple divorced in 1999 more than ten years after he left the agency in 1987.

‘Samantha was married to Ruslan Tsarnaev (Tsarni) for 3-4 years, and they lived in Bishkek for one year where Samantha was working for Price Waterhouse on privatization projects,’ Mr Fuller said. ‘They also lived in our house in [Maryland] for a year or so and they were divorced in 1999, I believe.

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Report: Baccalaureate Speaker Uninvited From Morehouse College Because He Criticized Obama

Photo Credit: NatalieMaynorThe Rev. Kevin Johnson, senior pastor of Bright Hope Baptist Church in North Philadelphia, was disinvited from speaking at Morehouse College because he wrote a newspaper column critical of President Obama’s administration, according to a group of alumni.

The college denied that Friday. Efforts to reach Johnson were unsuccessful.

The controversy erupted Friday afternoon when a group called Citizens for Change issued a news release that gave the following account:

Johnson, a Morehouse alumnus, had been chosen as this year’s baccalaureate speaker, to address the college community a day before Obama’s graduation visit and commencement speech May 19.

On April 15, it said, Morehouse president John Silvanus Wilson Jr. phoned Johnson to rescind the invitation, saying he was concerned about Johnson’s recent column in the Philadelphia Tribune that said there was a scarcity of African American appointees in Obama’s cabinet and a lack of policies to reduce poverty.

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Immigration Bill Guts E-Verify For Years

Photo Credit: J. Scott ApplewhiteThe Senate’s complex immigration bill would instantly gut the popular E-Verify system that is widely used to exclude illegal immigrants from jobs, and then create an enforcement gap for several years before the arrival of a replacement system.

“There’s no doubt that the bill eliminates E-Verify immediately upon signing,” said Kris Kobach, secretary of state of Kansas, told The Daily Caller.

“If there’s no statutory authority for E-Verify, there’s no E-Verify,” said Kobach, a lawyer trained at Harvard, Oxford and Yale universities, and a prominent advocate for reduced immigration.

The claim is vehemently disputed by the bills’ advocates, including staffers working for Sen. Marco Rubio.

However, Rubio staffers were unable to show TheDC any text in the legislation that gives the current E-Verify system legal backing until the new system is mandated in several years.

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Obama's Borrowed More Per Household ($53,616) Than Median Household Earns ($50,502)

Photo Credit: APUnder President Barack Obama, the federal government’s debt has increased by an amount per household that exceeds the annual median household income.

Since Obama’s first inauguration on Jan. 20, 2009, the federal debt has climbed $6,167,472,778,984.22. That equals about $53,616 for each of the 115,031,000 households the Census Bureau currently estimates are in the country.

By contrast, the Census Bureau’s most recent estimate of the median household income was $50,502 (for 2011).

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